Someone To Love

by Mary Balogh

  There was a swell of aggrieved assent.

  Oh dear. Miss Nunce, Anna recalled, was the new teacher.

  “Olga!” Miss Ford sounded acutely embarrassed.

  “Well, you know,” Anna said, “Miss Nunce is quite correct. Very few dreams come true in exactly the way we dream them. But dreams can come true in unexpected ways that bring just as much happiness. If you dream of being the captain of a great sailing ship, you may not achieve your dream. But you may realize that a life on the seas is what you want and become a sailor and see the world and be the happiest person you can possibly be. And if you dream of marrying a prince—or a duke—you may not achieve that dream, for there are not very many princes and dukes available.”

  She paused to let the delighted laughter die down, during which several of the children pointed at Avery and screeched with glee. “But you may find a man who will love you and provide for you and win your devotion, and you may marry him and be happy for the rest of your life. The same may be true in reverse for the boys. Dreams are very important, for they can give us many hours of pleasure, and they can help inspire us and point us in the direction we need to go in life. But what is the most important fact about ourselves that we must always, always remember? Who can tell me?”

  Several hands stretched high.

  “Tommy?”

  “That we are just as important as anyone else, miss,” Tommy said. “Just as important as him.” He pointed cheekily at Avery. “But not more important than anyone else.”

  “Exactly so,” she said, beaming at him. “But I do not mean to contradict what Miss Nunce has taught you. I believe she does not want any of you to be disappointed if the grandest of your dreams never come true. She does not want to see you hurt. She wants you to see that there are success and fulfillment and happiness to be found in all sorts of surprising places. Life often moves us in unexpected directions. But goodness me, most of you have already spent much of the day in the schoolroom here learning your lessons. I will not keep you longer. I will allow Miss Ford to dismiss you. But I think of you all every day, you know. I was happy here. It is a happy place.”

  The children cheered again but showed no reluctance to be set free. Anna bit her lip, on the verge of tears. She loved them all so dearly. It was not a sentimental or a pitying love, though. They all had a path in life to forge and follow, and really they had as much chance of a good life as most children who grew up in a home with their parents. Even those children’s lives were not without challenges.

  “I am not at all sure I spoke the truth about Miss Nunce,” she said to Avery as they made their way back to the hotel, still on foot. “If she kills those children’s dreams, she will take away from them something that is infinitely precious. What would they be, what would any of us be, without dreams?”

  “You must not distress yourself,” he said. “The woman sounds like a killjoy to me and ought not to be allowed within two miles of a schoolroom. She opposed the idea of books for the children, did she not? But she does not have the power to kill dreams, Anna. Dreams are as natural and as essential to us as breathing. Those children will dream on. The boys will want to be another Lord Nelson, though presumably without his death. The girls will want to marry a prince or be another Joan of Arc without the martyrdom.”

  “Do even dukes dream?” she asked him.

  “I was not a duke as a child,” he said, “merely a marquess.”

  “And do marquesses dream?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “What?” she asked. “What did you dream of? What do you dream of?”

  He was silent for so long that she thought he was not going to answer her. They were almost up to the doors of the hotel before he spoke.

  “Someone to love,” he said softly when it was just too late for her to make any reply.

  * * *

  Anna’s friend Joel Cunningham joined them for dinner that evening in a private dining room at the Royal York. He came striding into the room, three minutes early, dressed unexceptionably but unimaginatively for evening. He was tall—though not particularly so—and broad of girth though not by any means fat. He had a round, open countenance, very short, dark hair and dark eyes. He had good teeth—he was smiling.

  Avery hated him on sight. His hand itched to grasp his quizzing glass, but he resisted.

  “Anna.” Both his hands were outstretched toward her. Avery might have been part of the furniture. “Just look at you. You look . . . elegant.”

  “Joel.” She was looking at him with a smile to match his own and both hands outstretched to his grasp. “I am so glad you could come. And that is a new coat. It is very smart.”

  They joined hands and both bent their elbows as though they were about to embrace. Perhaps they did not, Avery thought, because he was not part of the furniture. Anna turned her still-beaming face toward him while still grasping the man’s hands.

  “Avery,” she said, “this is my dear friend Joel Cunningham.”

  “I rather thought it was,” Avery said on a sigh, and despite himself his fingers curled about the handle of his glass. “How do you do?”

  “Avery, my husband,” Anna said, “the Duke of Netherby.”

  Cunningham released her hands and turned to make his bow, and Avery was interested to note that the man looked at him with the same sort of critical appraisal and veiled hostility as he had just looked at Cunningham. Like two dogs coveting the same bone? What an alarmingly lowering thought.

  “Delighted,” Cunningham said.

  Anna was looking from one to the other of them, and Avery could see that she had sized up the situation quite accurately and was amused.

  It was not an auspicious start to the evening, but Avery certainly did not like the image of himself as a jealous husband—it was enough to give him the shudders. And Cunningham swallowed whatever hostility he might have brought with him or conceived at his first sight of the man his friend had married. They settled into a three-way conversation that was really rather pleasant, and the food was certainly superior.

  Cunningham was an intelligent, well-read man. He was making what Avery understood to be an increasingly lucrative income as a portrait painter, though he dreamed of making a name for himself as a landscape artist, and he had a vague dream too of becoming a writer. “Though people with some talent in the visual arts are not always similarly talented with words,” he said.

  “Are those who sit for your portraits still mostly older people?” Anna asked him. “I know you always longed to paint younger persons.”

  He thought about it. “Yes, I enjoy painting youth and beauty,” he said, “but older people tend to have more character to be captured on canvas. They present a more interesting challenge. It is only recently that I have realized that. Perhaps it is a sign that my own character is maturing.”

  He had not made much if any progress in keeping an eye on the Misses Westcott, he reported to Anna. Cunningham had seen who he assumed to be the younger sister enter the Pump Room with her grandmother on a couple of occasions, but he had not set eyes at all upon the elder.

  “I did meet Mrs. Kingsley with the younger Miss Westcott at one of Mrs. Dance’s literature evenings,” he said, “and she was complimentary about the miniatures I had taken with me. She made mention of two granddaughters she had living with her and was clearly thinking about the possibilities. I wrote to you about this, Anna, did I not? But I have not heard from her since, and I have not knocked upon her door, easel in hand. Sometimes these things take time and patience and a little maneuvering.”

  Anna smiled in understanding. “Avery and I called there today,” she said. “They are in good hands with Mrs. Kingsley, Joel, and I never intended you to do more than locate them for me and assure me, if you could, that they were settled here.”

  Cunningham also volunteered his time to teach art at the orphanage a few afternoons a we
ek. Avery asked him how well he worked with the new teacher, and he grimaced.

  “She is a nincompoop,” he said. “But a dangerous nincompoop, for she seems highly respectable, the sort of person who must know all about teaching and the needs of growing children. She knows worse than nothing. She resents the fact that I teach art and keeps alluding to the fact that she is an accomplished watercolorist and has won acclaim from all sorts of dusty people. She has taken to listening in on my lessons and occasionally openly contradicting me. In the Gospel according to Miss Nunce, good art has nothing whatsoever to do with talent or the imagination or—heaven forbid—an artist’s individual vision, and everything to do with correctly learned and meticulously applied craftsmanship. When one of my boys painted a sky full of light and color and life and glory, she refused to have it displayed in the schoolroom because the sky was not a uniform blue and there was no yellow ball in the top right-hand corner with yellow rays of equal length coming from it. I thanked her, in front of the children, with awful courtesy—you would have loved it, Anna—for making it possible for me to take the painting to display in my studio.”

  Oh,” Anna said, her elbow on the table, her chin in her hand, “if I could just have been a fly on the wall.”

  “She is trying to make it impossible for me to stay,” Joel said. “But I am too stubborn to go, and I care for the children too much to oblige her. I hope I am making it impossible for her to stay. You ought to see how I allow the children to stuff all the art supplies into the cupboard, Anna. You would have scolded me for a week. Miss Nunce merely looks grim and martyred and complains to Miss Ford.”

  Anna laughed and Avery began to like the man.

  “You are a fortunate man, Netherby,” Cunningham told him not long before he took his leave. “I made Anna a marriage proposal a couple of years or so ago, but she refused me. Has she told you? She informed me that I was just lonely after leaving the orphanage. She told me I would live to regret it if she said yes. She was undoubtedly right—she often is. I envy you, but she remains my friend.”

  He was sending a distinct message, Avery realized. He was in Anna’s life to stay, but since she had married Avery, there would be no resentment, no jealousy. There would be no reason for continued hostility.

  “I envy me too,” Avery said while Anna looked between them again, as she had earlier, aware of the undercurrents. “My wife has been very fortunate to grow up with someone who will remain a lifelong friend. Not many people can make the same claim. I hope we will meet again.”

  He meant it too—almost. But he did not for a moment believe that Anna was no more to Cunningham than a friend. He rather suspected that Anna did not even realize the true nature of the man’s feelings for her.

  Soon after that they all shook hands and Cunningham set off home.

  “Oh, Avery,” Anna said, turning to him when they were alone, “it feels so strange to be back here with everything the same yet altogether different.”

  “You are sad?” he asked.

  “No.” She frowned in thought. “Not sad. How could I be? Just—” She laughed softly. “Just sad.”

  He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her. “We will leave here tomorrow,” he said. “But we will return. We can never go back, my duchess, but we can always revisit the past.”

  “Yes.” Her eyes were swimming with tears. “Oh, what a strange and emotional couple of weeks these have been. But I am ready to leave.”

  A couple of weeks ago they had not even been married. He could not imagine himself now without Anna—a slightly alarming thought.

  “Come to bed,” he said. “Let me make love to you.”

  “Yes,” she said, leaning into him.

  But she still looked sad.

  Twenty-three

  Falling in love had been easy. In fact, it had not even been that. It had just happened. Avery had neither planned nor expected nor particularly wanted it. He had fallen in love anyway. Deciding to marry and make an offer had also been easy. It had been done without forethought, entirely on the spur of the moment, largely because—he winced slightly at the thought—it had seemed altogether possible she might be persuaded and persuade herself into marrying Riverdale. Getting married had been easy. There had been no trouble or delay in acquiring the license or in finding a clergyman willing and able to marry them that very morning—or in persuading Anna to go with him.

  The following two weeks had been blissful. Yes, that was a suitable word and not at all exaggerated. He had relaxed into the wonder of his marriage—and yes, even that word wonder was appropriate. He had allowed himself to enjoy companionship, friendship, and sex with his wife. He had fallen half in love with her grandparents and their way of life. He had felt a bit like a child in a playhouse during that week at the vicarage, with not a care in the world and without self-consciousness. He had even enjoyed Bath. Camille and Abigail were very obviously still suffering, but they were in safe hands and they would work things out. He was confident of that. They had not taken their half sister to their bosoms, but they had made an effort to be civil. He had marveled at the orphanage, which had not been the grim institution he had half expected, but which had nevertheless been his wife’s very spartan home for twenty-one years. She was loved there, and she was deeply fond of everyone, staff and children alike. He had even rather enjoyed the evening they had spent with Cunningham, whom he had been prepared to dislike and despise. But the man was intelligent, interesting, and honorable. It was clear he had feelings for Anna, but he had chosen, apparently a few years ago, to be her friend if he could be nothing more.

  Yes, everything had been easy and idyllic until their return to London. Almost happily-ever-after idyllic. But in London, Avery discovered that he did not know how to be married. Not an idea. Not a clue. And so, true to himself, he withdrew into his shell, like a tortoise, until he felt reasonably comfortable.

  Even reasonable comfort was not easy, though. There had always been a distance—a self-imposed one—between him and the majority of his acquaintances. Most people, he knew, stood somewhat in awe of him. Now, suddenly, the distance was enormous. He had married one of the greatest heiresses ever to set foot upon the marriage mart almost before everyone else had had a chance to catch a glimpse of her—there had not even been a notice of their betrothal in the morning papers, only of their marriage. And then he had disappeared with her for two weeks in the very midst of the Season. Now he was back.

  Among the men, of course, there was something of far greater import than his marriage—except perhaps among those who had hoped to marry the fortune themselves. There was that damned duel, which Avery had vainly hoped would be forgotten about by the time he returned. Instead, the incident had reached mythic proportions in the collective mind, and men stared at him—and looked hastily away when he and his quizzing glass caught them at it—with fascination and fear. Uxbury was said to be still in his bed, though doubtless the lump on the back of his head had shrunk from the size of a cricket ball to that of an ant’s egg—if ants had eggs—and the bruises on his chin had probably faded to pale mustard from black and purple.

  Avery made his appearance in the House of Lords a number of times, having neglected his duties there lately. He visited his clubs, accompanied his wife to a number of social events, and very correctly kept his distance from her until it was time to escort her home. He took her driving in Hyde Park a couple of times at the fashionable hour and walked with her once down by the Serpentine, weaving their way among other people. Most evenings he dined at home with her and his stepmother and Jessica, who was now deemed adult enough to join them. He slept in Anna’s bed and made love to her at least once each night. They ate breakfast together and looked through their invitations together after Edwin Goddard had sorted them.

  There was absolutely nothing wrong with his marriage. It was no different from any other ton marriage as far as he could tell. And that—devil take it!
—was the trouble. He had no idea how to make it better, how to recapture the glow and euphoria of those two weeks. It had been what people referred to as a honeymoon, he supposed. Honeymoons, by their very nature, could not be expected to last.

  Perhaps things would be different—better—when the parliamentary session was at an end and with it the Season and they could go home to Morland Abbey for the summer. Her grandparents would be coming for a few weeks. But he was well aware that the future could never be relied upon to be an improvement upon the present. The future did not exist. Only the present did.

  The present was . . . disappointing. He had known happiness for a couple of weeks. Yes. He tested the thought in his mind. Yes, he had been happy. He was not enjoying being back to normal. And of course, even normal was no longer normal. For there was his wife and there was his marriage and he did not know quite what to do with either one. He was not accustomed to feeling inadequate, out of control of his own destiny.

  He spent long hours upstairs in his attic room—he suspected Anna did not even know he was at home—but though he worked himself mercilessly until he was bathed in sweat, and sat in meditative pose until he almost turned into a sphinx, he could find no peace. He could not find that place beneath and behind his whirling thoughts into which to sink and find rest. And always, always, in the attic, out of it, in bed, everywhere, he could not escape the echo of a slow, peaceful voice telling him in its pronounced Chinese accent: You are whole, my boy, right through to the hollow center. Love lives at the center of wholeness and pervades it all. When you find love, you will be at peace.

  But, so annoyingly typical of his master, he had never been willing to explain such remarks. Deep and lasting truths could be learned only from experience, he had always explained. It had been pointless for Avery to argue that he did love—his dead mother, his father, his little half sister, oh, numerous people. The Chinese gentleman had only smiled and nodded.